Wilful blindness to Peterson’s antics verges on impunity

Twitter brings out the worst in us. This is especially true of Jordan Peterson, who took to the social media platform on October 26 to air his latest grievances in notably unorthodox fashion.

The U of T psychology professor was lamenting the postponement of a panel he was scheduled to partake in at Ryerson University titled “The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses,” featuring notable figures like Gad Saad, Oren Amitay, and former Rebel Media reporter Faith Goldy. The panel was cancelleddue to safety concerns, according to Ryerson, followed by organized protests by student and non-student activists alike.

Among the protesters were two activists, George Brown student Marco La Grotta and U of T graduate Christeen Elizabeth, who became the targets of online harassment after Peterson tweeted URL links to their personal Facebook profiles in retaliation for the panel’s cancellation. “Communists,” who “celebrated the shutdown of our Ryerson talk,” he captioned the tweets.

One of the communists (really) who celebrated the shutdown of our Ryerson talk: studying business… https://t.co/WjqzCGNEq5

Some of his Twitter followers, a horde of over 245,000, quickly assumed mob mentality. “She is utterly insane, fck that dumb btch,” wrote one, replying to Peterson’s tweet. “The s*** truth Seekers have to deal with,” wrote another. The few users who questioned Peterson’s decision to link to the activists’ profiles were quickly dismissed as ‘concern trolls.’ Peterson’s tweets have received a total of 108 retweets as of press time.

As a result of this sudden exposure, both Elizabeth and La Grotta opened their Facebook inboxes to discover extensive hate mail and violent threats. “Im coming after your kids you bitch,” wrote one user to Elizabeth. “You deserve the bread line and the gulag,” wrote another. Following numerous messages and anti-semitic depictions sent his way, La Grotta temporarily deactivated his Facebook account.

Below: messages sent to La Grotta and Elizabeth’s Facebook inboxes following Peterson’s tweets.

Exposing the Facebook profiles of two student activists is, especially for a tenured professor earning a six-figure salary, a sad display of bullying and anti-intellectual behaviour. But it’s not the professor’s first endorsement of online harassment. More recently, Peterson announced his plans to launch a website that would allow students to identify left-leaning faculty members and “postmodern” course material, what U of T’s faculty association says has “created a climate of fear and intimidation” at the university.

Meanwhile, Peterson’s increasingly erratic behaviour has gone almost entirely overlooked by the university itself. Peterson has demonstrated a deteriorating ability to interact maturely with many of those he is paid to interact with — a pattern that should give any employer cause for concern in any profession — and yet time and time again, the university has cowered to him, leaving students and other faculty to bear the brunt of his antics.

The trouble began in September 2016 when Peterson first stepped into the ring with campus activists following his statements on Bill C-16 and his refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns. Ever since, Peterson has found himself in numerous public yelling matches with students protesting his events or rallies.

While not necessarily the fault of Peterson alone, the exchanges have been anything but productive, serving only to foster animosity between the professor and swaths of the student body. Peterson has become so engulfed in ideological warfare that it’s unclear whether he could detach that from the necessary fairness required of a professional academic.

This inundation extends to Peterson’s interaction with student media as well. In October 2016, a staff writer at The Varsity reached out to Peterson for comment on a news story they were writing. The writer took all the necessary steps in assuring the due diligence of a reporter: they provided Peterson with the premise of their story, a sincere set of questions, and a deadline for when to respond.

Peterson, who normally declines to provide comment for The Varsity’s reporting, responded by threatening the writer, telling them they were “playing with serious fire” and that “reality [would] arrange itself so [they would] have serious cause to regret it” if they didn’t “play it straight and careful.”

It’s instances like these that make us question Peterson’s capacity for moral judgment, and how someone displaying such a lack thereof could be employed at a university where students and faculty are expected to work amicably with one another.

Peterson’s recent actions have only made us question this more. In July,he shared an article from InfoWars on Twitter, a publication known for actively spreading falsehoods and baseless conspiracy theories. In October, he railed on what he referred to as “female insanity,” arguing that men can’t control “crazy women” because men are not allowed to physically fight them. All the while, Peterson has been profiting greatly off his antics: in exchange for lectures and panel discussions on political correctness run amok, Peterson earns tens of thousands of dollars from Patreon subscriptions on a monthly basis. He offers video recordings of his lectures to his subscribers and promotes ‘anti-PC’ sticker-sets for the real keeners among them.

In an academic setting, it is detrimental to the pursuit of truth and understanding to embrace fake news, to use terms like ‘crazy’ and ‘insanity’ without an inkling of actual medical diagnosis, and to exploit divisive political issues in order to turn a profit. Moreover, it is antithetical to a safe and productive learning environment to threaten students and faculty, and to expose their personal information online when you disagree with them.

It is evident, too, that the university is unsure of how to handle this problem, and it’s not hard to see why. When the administration fails to intervene in Peterson-related controversies, they are scolded by his opposers on account of complacency. When the administration makes an effort to chide Peterson, as they did so delicately last year throughan open letter asking him to respect students’ personal pronouns, Peterson cries oppression.

As a result, the administration has become like the parent at daycare who doesn’t know how to discipline their petulant child. When The Varsity asked the media relations office if the university believed Peterson’s actions toward the two students were appropriate behaviour for a professor, they declined to answer directly, replying that “universities are places where people can express opinions that are controversial and sometimes unsettling.”

This response was disappointing, to say the least. Peterson’s latest actions are not a matter of free speech. Of course free speech and free expression are imperative to a properly functioning liberal democracy. Of course these principles are paramount to a healthy learning experience in a university setting. But Peterson’s latest actions are a matter of harassment, and if the administration cannot distinguish this matter from a matter of free speech then students and faculty alike should be gravely concerned.

The administration must recognize that Peterson’s latest actions extend beyond the realm of ideological debate and into the realm of ideological aggression and, in turn, it must reconsider the values it holds in teachers. It must ask if it is appropriate for its employees to threaten students and incite harassment onto dissenters. It must ask if it is prudent to indulge a professor who has exchanged nuanced, intellectual thought for the inflamed rhetoric he knows will tickle the fancy of his rabid fanbase.

Should Peterson be made aware of this editorial, he will inevitably dismiss it as the rhetoric of the ‘neo-Marxist postmodernists’ that oppose him — overreacting, triggered leftists that need to sort themselves out. Many of his followers will mindlessly agree.

So, given the futility of confronting Peterson directly, our attention turns instead to the administration, whose role it is to reflect on the core values of the institution it leads, and to judge whether Peterson’s recent behaviour has a place at this university. Because in our opinion, it doesn’t.

AD

Edgy thoughts

The radical ideas of online fringe groups can make a real world impact

Hypertabs is The Varsity‘s online features subsection about all things Internet. Our goal is to explore the depths of the online world and understand how it shapes our habits and affects our communities. You can read the other articles included in this project here.

The Internet has the ability to affect nearly every facet of a student’s life. If you need to search for a library book, the catalogue is online. If you’re not sure how to cite a source, you can Google it. When you want to know when the next event for a student society is, Facebook is often to first place to check. Even during lectures and classes, students browse websites such as Twitter and reddit, reading the most recent updates on their favourite forums. They are part of different online communities, where they can interact with other users who share their interests and hobbies.

Online communities offer acceptance, support, and rapport. In January, reddit boasted over 19 million unique visitors, and hosted 800,000 individual, user created forums, or ‘subreddits’. Twitter has approximately 320 million monthly active users, while Tumblr has 555 million, and social media behemoth Facebook averages over 1.5 billion active monthly users; most students are members of at least one..

While these sites can provide easy entertainment through bad jokes, cute animal pictures, or inspiring stories, they are also home to more tumultuous communities. Fringe groups, especially those that advocate for radical social and political change, are very active online. These types of communities — anti-vaxxers, Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) — can become talking points in the public sphere.

Many men who identify as part of the MRA movement believe that there are significant social and legal inequalities affecting men that are not being addressed by society, and particularly by fourth-wave feminism. Issues such as paternity rights and sexual assault are popular topics of discussion on MRA subreddits and Twitter accounts. The forums rarely contain original content; instead, users share newspaper articles which they then discuss. The men’s rights subreddit page (r/MensRights) has 115,676 unique readers, the largest of all mainstream men’s rights related subreddits. r/MensRights is in the top 400 subreddits based on number of subscribers, an accomplishment on a website as popular as reddit. MRA activists are also active on Twitter with several hashtags and accounts devoted to the cause.

Online MRA groups often the cause of controversy. r/RedPill is a subreddit that references The Matrix, where the protagonist takes a red pill to make himself aware of his true surroundings. The majority of its 142,000 subscribers are male, and unlike mainstream MRA groups, these subscribers create the majority of the content. Outrage and anger is expressed at posted personal anecdotes of men being scorned by women, and congratulations are offered for stories about subscribers’ successful sexual encounters. r/RedPill embraces the MRA philosophy of turning “beta” males into “alphas”, anti-feminism, and the techniques of so-called ‘pick up artists. There is a strong sense of community and loyalty in r/RedPill, which some have gone so far to describe as cult-like.

Recently, notorious pick-up artist Daryush Valizadeh, or “Roosh V”, made headlines by calling for the members of his website “Return of Kings” to meet up in person on Feb 2, 2016. While the meetings — one of which would have been held in Queen’s Park — were cancelled two days later, the plans garnered international media attention. This is merely one example of how the actions of a online fringe group can have real world ramifications.

Online threats of violence against female U of T students were made last September. In an instance of online threats being put into action, in 2014 Elliot Rodger — an active member of the MRA community — committed a mass murder-suicide in California. Before committing the attack, he posted a video claiming that his motives were retribution against women who had rejected him sexually. These events don’t necessarily suggest that online communities are the cause behind such behaviour. However, they offer a unique outlet where radical thoughts can be expressed without judgment or fear of real repercussion.

Some online communities even have enough clout to influence mainstream politics — anti-vaxxers are a good example. The movement, which began in 1998, believes that vaccines cause autism, among other problems, in young children. Proponents of the “Vaccine Resistance Movement” congregate on Facebook pages and use Twitter to target politicians and lobbyists that are pro-vaccine. They base their beliefs on a now debunked scientific study on the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine by a British physician who lost his medical license due to the study. It is now believed that his findings were a correlation, not causation, as signs of autism typically emerge around the same time the MMR vaccine is administered.

While any immunology student studying in Gerstein can tell you that avoiding vaccines can cause serious problems, it wasn’t until last year when a measles outbreak in the United States reinvigorated the public conversation on anti-vaccine philosophy. As such, California lawmakers have now passed legislation preventing parents from citing “personal beliefs” as a reason for not vaccinating their child. It is now mandatory for all children in public schools to be vaccinated. This is a way of preventing the spread of measles and other viruses to not only children, but also to the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. Even Rand Paul, member of the US Senate and trained physician, has come out against vaccines, but has since become pro-vaccine due to backlash.

As we spend more and more of our time online, we have to be critical with the content of what we choose to engage with. Fringe ideas are making their way to the forefront of our lives with the click of a button. While many of them may be harmless, it’s been proven that radical online thought can incite real world danger.